Re: su does not appear to be working

[Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 12:01:53PM -0500, Jason Stechschulte wrote:
> If I look at the permissions for /bin/su, on a working machine:
> -rwsr-xr-x
>    ^
> I'm assuming this has something to do with it.  From my limited
> knowledge, I believe this is called the sticky bit?

Close, but not quite:

-rwsr-sr-s
   ^  ^  ^
   |  |  --- sticky
   |  --- sgid
   --- suid

> Could someone please
> point me to where I can find out how to change the permissions to this
> and to get a little more knowledge on the subject?

`chmod u+s /bin/su` will fix this particular problem.  `man chmod`
will tell you a bit more about permissions, but I can't tell you what
the definitive reference would be.

-- 
When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists
have already won. - reverius

Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss